BUTLER, Pa. — A local woman says she has nowhere else to turn after being hit with a $63,000 overpayment notice from the Social Security Administration, just weeks before Christmas.
Ruthann Pickerd reached out to 11 Investigates to get answers, fearing she wouldn’t be able to pay her bills or take care of her adult son with disabilities.
Pickerd first qualified for Social Security Disability in 2021. She has a rare autoimmune disease and had to give up her 30-year career as a nurse with the VA.
Now she can’t afford her infusions and has stopped treatment, all because of a letter from the Social Security Administration. That letter came in February of 2024. That’s when her Social Security Disability payments stopped coming. She filed for a waiver and waited.
“I got a letter from the SSA, 17 months later, saying we received your request for a waiver,” Pickerd tells Channel 11. “17 months I waited.”
They told her she was out of luck. The reason?
“It says you’ve been working full-time,” Pickerd said. “I’m not working. I haven’t worked.”
Her adult son with disabilities gets a waiver for his care through Medicaid. The SSA treats the waiver as her income and said she should have never qualified for social security disability in the first place.
“I’ve been sitting on eggshells for two years, waiting for them,” Pickerd added. “Now, right before the holidays, they decide we want our money. It doesn’t matter what happens to you or your son; we just want our money.”
Pickerd already lost her husband, a Vietnam veteran, suddenly. Now she’s afraid of losing her home.
“If you start taking the money that I do get: what’s going to be first? My electric, my heat?”
Pickerd also fears her son will lose the care he deserves.
“To put him in a group home would probably kill me,” she added.
Pickerd said the SSA is threatening jail time, a fine, or taking money right from her bank account.
We reached out to Pickerd’s local Congressman, Mike Kelly and our state Senators, Fetterman and McCormick. We’re waiting to hear back.
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